Here’s a mind-boggling fact: Almost all mammals fart, yet the sloth does not.
I learned this because I recently read Does it Fart? A Definitive Field Guide to Animal Flatulence, which publishes Tuesday. It’s a small (133 pages), illustrated compendium of all things that toot from the rear.
Each page of the book is devoted to one animal and one question: Does it fart?
Orangutans? Yes.
Salamanders? Maybe.
Sloths? No.
Dani Rabaiotti, a PhD zoology student at the Zoological Society of London and co-author of the book, studies how climate change impacts African wild dogs. But in early 2017, her brother asked her, “Do snakes fart?” and she didn’t know the answer. So she posed it to an expert on Twitter. (Spoiler: They do.)